


The Road to Ithaka

by miabicicletta



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-25
Updated: 2011-03-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 06:14:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miabicicletta/pseuds/miabicicletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wants to mourn her, if she’d only let him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road to Ithaka

**Title:** The Road to Ithaka  
 **Author** : [](http://miabicicletta.livejournal.com/profile)[ **miabicicletta**](http://miabicicletta.livejournal.com/)    
 **Summary:** He wants to mourn her, if she’d only let him.  
 **Rating:** MA  
 **Characters/Pairing** : Roslin/Adama, with a bit of Baltar/Caprica and Helo/Athena if you look closely  
 **Wordcount:** 1,750  
 **Disclaimer:** All characters are property of their respective owners.   
 **Notes** : Is happy!angst a thing? This can be seen as part of the History Books verse, or as a stand alone. However you like. 

 _Ithaka has given you the beautiful journey.  
Without her you would have never set out on the road._  
-Constantine Cavafy, Ithaka (1911)

\---

Bill stays alone on the hill above the valley, fashioning his confinement into a self-imposed mourning period for everything lost since the end of the worlds.

The Colonies.

 _Galactica_.

Family.

Laura.

The last one is the hardest. He wants to mourn her, if only she would let him.

\---

He can’t bring himself to leave.

She’s been gone an hour, or a day. It doesn’t matter anymore; time stretches out, shrinks to nothing. The sun rises, sun sets, and out across the savanna, the grasses shift in the wind in wide supple waves. Life, impossibly, but inevitably, goes on.

He tells her about it. It’s all he can think to do.

“When the sun comes from behind those mountains,” he says, the familiar ache of grief blooming in his chest, “it's almost heavenly.”

“I think you’re romanticizing things a bit, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

\---

“You’re not real,” he hisses.

Again he curses his mind for creating this hopeless mirage, has lost count of how many times he has already. She’s so perfect in detail, down to the pattern of freckles on her shoulder, the pink curl of her ears. A torment, sprung whole from his psyche, this idealized version of Laura (“I’m not _idealized_ ,” she says. “This is what I _looked_ like.”) the result of post-traumatic stress to a laughably exponential order.

She’s Laura, and she’s perfect. But she’s also  _dead_.

He curses his body for wanting her, and his heart just for wanting.

“You’re _not real!_ ” He yells, and pulls her face close to his.

“Oh, Bill, of course I’m real,” she says, leaning into his palm. “I’m just not alive.”

\---

He decides it doesn’t matter that he’s losing his mind.

If this is the manifestation of some tumor or degenerative disease, hopefully it’d kill him sooner rather than later, and in the meantime he could do with worse hallucinations than her. Laura laughs at him, calls him a stubborn old atheist, and at the way her eyes sparkle, he almost wants to believe her.

“Lee misses you.”

She sits on the outcropping, near her own funeral cairn. She’s wearing green today, and idly draws lines in the dust. “You don’t need to sulk on a mountain-top all alone to prove your devotion, you know.”

“I’m not sulking.” He grunts, chopping another piece of wood. _Yes, you are. You just don’t know that’s what it’s called._

Laura tips her head back, snorting at his obstinance. “No, _never_. Admirals don’t sulk: they sit quietly and weigh the quality of their legacy in idle solitude at the cost of every fundamental relationship they have left.”

“I’m not idle.” The cabin might not be going up fast, but he’s made progress.

“Bill, this is silly...”

She goes off on another argument, trying to coax him back into life. He’d stomp off, but it won’t make a difference. She follows him wherever he goes.

\---

 _She’s dead._

“I died.”

 _She’s gone._

“I’m here.”

Bill lays on his back, looking up at the sky; as wide as grief, and bleeding starry tears.

“No need to be melodramatic.” Laura hums, and threads her fingers through his hair.

\---

His ring is on her finger.

They’re lying in the Raptor bed, the rain outside beats a gentle pattern on the hull. He traces the gold band, noting the way it fits her perfectly.

“You might have asked, you know.”

“Thought about it,” he admits, turning her hand in his.

“What gave you pause?” she asks, nuzzling against his neck

He thinks, not really sure what his answer is. “It didn’t seem necessary.” He allows a moment go by before wondering. “Would you have said yes?”

The look she gives him is reproachful, but he smiles anyway.

Not that it means anything.

\---

It rains and Laura’s hair gets soaked. Despite her complaint, she tilts her head to the sky, the cool droplets streaming down her face.

The sun is punishing and browns him in a month, yet her skin remains pale. Which, more than anything else, is evidence of his growing lunacy.

“It’s not that,” she replies. She loves pointing out the many ways _his_ reasoning is unsound, as if it makes perfect sense that a woman who died would be walking and talking at his side.

“I just hate getting sunburned,” Laura explains. Her back is turned to him as she considers a listless jacaranda.

The next morning it blooms.

\---

If this is losing his mind, he’ll welcome madness until the end of his days.

He fraks her there in the red dirt, their bodies pressed into the Earth; his hands in her hair, her mouth on his throat; she’s so much fiercer, so much stronger; more playful and wilder, like he always imagined she could be. He is the one dying now, and more so with every day it seems from the fever dream of this sweet purgatory.

She tastes like Laura, but better. Her gasps resolve into rich, throaty laughter as he maps the unchanging porcelain length of her neck, thrusting deep, hard inside her, rougher than he’d ever have dared while she was alive and dying. There’s sweat and tears and love and hurts between them. He can still get her to laugh, she still has the power to bring him to tears of rage. The same is true of the other.

And that, more than anything, makes him start to believe.

\---

He gives in, after a time. She’s not going to let a little thing like dying get in the way of winning arguments, and smiles victoriously while they walk.

The settlement isn’t large, not nearly the size it was on New Caprica. People have wandered, spreading out over the continent, seeking the spaces space deprived them of.

“Huh. Figured you’d be dead by now,” Sherman Cottle barks. But he offers Bill a cigarette, the most treasured of his possessions, and the highest honor he has left to offer. Bill gratefully declines.

An hour outside of the town, near a small stream and glade, is a farm and three houses, a roughly hewn fence. Baltar’s farm. Two tow-headed girls play games in the grass, and a tall blonde woman who can only be Caprica bounces a baby on her hip as she strides purposefully from one structure to the next. When she catches sight of the Admiral, she stops in her tracks and lifts her hand in greeting. She never stops smiling.

“They’re doing well.”

“Some,” Laura says. “Not others.”

“When Helo dies,” Laura says cryptically, leaning over the fence, “Athena is going to kill herself.”

Bill looks at her sharply, but Laura’s eyes never turn from the pastoral picture before them. Why would she tell him that? Why would she _do_ that? But of course he knows the answer. It's the same thing that kept him alone on a hill, waiting for the day he’d wake up dead.

An older girl emerges from one of the doorways, skipping across the lawn.

“Because he made her human.”

Laura waves at Hera.

Hera waves back.

\---

She disappears occasionally. For hours, or for days that send him into complete, unanticipated panic.

One time she is gone for a month and he finds himself weeping, mourning for her all over again. Certain this time it is forever.

But then dawn comes one morning and she is there, hugging her knees and watching the sun rise. When she learns how long it had been, she looks almost shocked. “A month,” she repeats, taken aback. “A _month_.”

He nods, tracing her palm with reverence, kissing her wrist.

“Oh,” she says, breathing out slowly. “Oh. _Oh_. I didn’t know.”

She doesn’t leave after that.

\---

“Do you remember the day we first met?”

He’s leaning against the stone retaining wall of their near-finished cabin, and she slides into his lap, leaning back against him. She’s so smooth under his calloused palms, warm and soft. “Of course I remember,” he replies, laying his cheek against her hair.

“The day the world ended,” she says. There’s a note of bitterness in her voice, as though they should feel tainted by this fact.

 _Not quite_ , Bill thinks.

\---

She reads to him now. Now that his vision is failing as the illness takes more and more of the life in him. This must have been what it felt like, for her, near the end. To have the fight stolen in increments, like a tack in his mitt, bleeding him slowly, but bleeding all the same. She reads to him now, and the ghost who haunts his waking hours will be the last company he’ll keep.

“I wish you were here,” he says.

The firelight flickers across her face. She looks sad and pretty and strangely young. She’s the only clear thing he can see anymore. “Me too.”

\---

The cabin has been done for two months, but he’ll never leave it now.

“I wanted you to see more of Earth,” she says tenderly. “It was your promise.” Her voice is that happy-sad tune she gets when she’s reminiscing.

“Wasn’t about Earth, for me,” he struggles to say. “Was Earth...for everyone else. Finding home.”

“We did that, didn’t we?” Her voice is muted, like sound coming through water.

He’s leaning into her, the support she always gave him. There is a journal at his side where he’s written the last words he’ll ever pen. He hopes, someday, someone will read it. The sun has just gone and the stars begin to flicker in the clear, graded blue twilight.

“We did.”

The stars come out, one by one, then, slowly, dozen by dozen. They're the last thing he sees. Her quiet humming, the last he hears.

\---

 _Have Ithaka always in your mind.  
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.  
But don't in the least hurry the journey.  
Better it last for years,  
so that when you reach the island you are old,  
rich with all you have gained on the way,  
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.  
Ithaka gave you the beautiful journey.  
Without her you would never have set out on the road._

 _She hasn't anything else to give you._   



End file.
